The Queer Politics of Failure in Casa Guidi Windows

Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her influential political poem, Casa Guidi Windows, in 1851. In its reflections on the failed revolution in Italy in 1848, the poem introduces a politics of childhood that identifies the trope of the singing Italian child as the source of poetic inspiration and the poet’s own Anglo-Italian son as a figure of consolation and hope in the face of overwhelming political failure. This article challenges past criticism on the poem which has naturalized the figure of the child as a logical extension of the poet’s domestic-orientated political reflections. Rather than viewing the child as a source of hope in the poem, this essay draws upon recent queer theory to analyze the violence behind Barrett Browning’s politics of childhood both in its infantilization of Italian culture and its idealization of the child. The article concludes with a reflection on the poet’s political education of her son and the effects it had on his childhood development. The failure of Barrett Browning’s son to live up to the impossible ideal envisioned for him in the poem exposes the ideological violence naturalized within the poet’s idealized figure of the child and represents a form of resistance to the very logic of Romantic childhood itself.